All about multiplatform and game development

Sorry about all the delay, I wrote 4 blog posts already in this week, but did not finish them up (was always too tired to post them). I will post them in the next few days. Instead this blog post is just about today.

The day started with the Community GetTogether Event from Microsoft on the CeBIT, where all the MVPs, CLIP, RDs, Student Partners, Codezone-Experts and Microsoft Evengelists from Germany met. Last year I could not attend the CeBIT or the Community GetTogether in Germany because I was on the GDC 2007 in San Francisco and wrote the GDC Dungeon Quest game there ^^

The first session was about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. Download it here if you want to try it out, it got some nice features for developers and other things like Activities and Webslices, which sound nice, but you will have to wait until more websites actually support them. The browser does not convince me yet. Maybe the presentation was not that great, many webpages did not look ok and the browser crashed several times, it also looks pretty much the same as IE7. I'm still using Firefox 2 (and 3 for playing around a bit) a lot more than any other browser, especially thanks to great addons like FireBug.

Anyway, after another session about Students in Germany and their lack of .NET knowledge and other things like how many do wash their clothes themselfs, the nice girl in front of me from Microsoft reminded me to take some photos myself :) Got ya, haha.

In between the sessions I met with my good friend Luo Yu (see photo, he is an amazing graphic artist and works with me on a couple of projects) and an ex-intern of mine Stefan Kraus from BiteTheBytes.com (see website link for more information, no photo here ^^). Stefan is involved in some interesting projects, some smaller games and especially his Cloddy Technology, which was created by him and 2 other friends to render huge 3D landscape areas with high performance in a unlimited amount of detail (well, after asking what that means it turns out it is limited by doubles ^^).

I sat through another session of the GetTogether Event, this time by my good old compadre Dirk Primbs about Visual Studio 2008. He has a lot of webcasts links on his blog, check it out if you want to see some german sessions :) Otherwise you should definately check out the Mix08 Session Videos from Las Vegas, I find the Video with the fake Elvis asking people about Silverlight 2.0 the funniest.

After some networking and meeting Microsoft people I joined with the other guys and walked through some CeBIT halls. Nothing special about the halls or people, it was very packed as always on Saturdays.

And as you can see here, if you look into this absolutely normal looking device and put these absolutely non-freaky glasses on, you can see some non-ugly animated figure telling waving at you in 3D. But beware, after a minute you might get some headaches and you have of course keep your head still and only look from a certain angle and distance. Man, when do they ever stop producing this bullshit? It is always the same kind of device in the last 10 years and no one buys it or really wants it.

Ok, here we see one of the exhibitors of the Games Convention 2008 throwing some stuff into the crowd .. wait a second, we are not on the Games Convention yet, this is still the CeBIT, but ok, it is Saturday and the people do not care where the presents are coming from. Fun to watch as always, and we have to ignore the fact that 10 years ago I was one of those guys too wanting to get a free ball pen I would never use.

These guys are building a freaking looking robot and have certainly not seen the new Terminator series yet. They are actually from the TU Chemnitz (a university) and it was a tournament where the robots had to play a game with tennis balls to catch some rings and score some points. Not as brutal as the Robot Wars (tv series), but certainly amazing work from students and a lot of participants. Nice athmosphere building and testing these robots by the way, there were many tables like this.

And here we see one of the teams testing their robot. And you can see me not having any useful camera, the robot was not even moving fast ^^ I should buy some better equipment for the next event I go to (next one will probably be the MVP Summit in a month).

Ok, we are back to the throwing useless stuff into crowd part!

And this is the huge booth of the T-Com/Telekom (together with IBM and SAP one of the biggest and best looking booths) where a lot of sessions were hold in the so called "Trendforum". You can watch all the videos from the CeBIT Trendforum here, some of the sessions are in english and the speakers are very good and have some interesting topics. I did not watch any of them there, but once my brother told me about it and gave me the link I watched some videos and were very pleased with them, especially the one from Nicholas Carr (author of book The Big Switch) about the changes in moving from local servers to a "world computer".

Big cars and small womans (that is what Luo told me as I took this picture) should also be on all fairs. Do we remember where this was? No, not really!

The Samsung booth was also very big, but I could not spot any new exciting big monitors. But there were a lot of small devices, headsets, mp3 players and other stuff that does not really interest me that much these days. I'm currently in the "I got all I need"-mode :)

And here you can see the plan of one of my new cities, just that is not by me and in fact some big company in Asia planing a new city part this way. Looks nice (is about 50cm x 50cm small).

This was really strange. We went on the Microsoft booth and just behind all the Xboxes and games there was a bakery. You could actually get some biscuits and bread after filling out a form about some IT questions.

And while we are on the Microsoft booth we thought about the question if Bill Gates might need some extra money to become the richest man on the world again after losing his first place the first time after 13 years this week. Maybe all Microsoft employees should start collecting some money for Bill :) This nice lady was trying to convince people to get active in the Microsoft Student Partner program, but I guess I'm already too old (oh my).

And here you can see me sitting down for a minute and happy that we can go home soon (hey, I'm a programmer sitting around all day, I'm not used to walking that much) :)

But we are not done yet, let take a look at this IBM server with 64 hard disks up to 500 GB, in total something like 30 TB storage space. You can even stack up (well, not on top of each other, just side by side in a big room) 6 of those beasts if that is not enough for you. But as we have learned from the webcast from Nicholas Carr above we won't need that much power in the future, just use the servers that are already in the internet. Other than that these things are not really cheap, I prefer building my own server setup.

In hall 18 there was a really loud band singing "Sex Bomb" and they actually did a good job. After spending some minutes there our ears almost explode and we went outside to cool off. Poor guys spending all those days in that booth (Trekstor actually, hey I remembered something).

And finally the ride back in a train full of people. We even took an early train, I do not want to know how full the later trains have been. Ok, time to finish up my other blog posts. I hope you enjoyed these pictures.